Columns, pieces and posts

Former White House press secretary Dana Perino has good, commonsensical advice for Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who’ll be questioning Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on ObamaCare tomorrow.

Boiled down: Can the theatrics, know your stuff, we don’t need re-enactments of constituent rage, be serious and sober. If members take this advice—Speaker John Boehner and Chairman Frd Upton should be sending it out—they’ll better their chances of meeting the moment and providing a service to their country.

Dana’s advice made me think of what I’d add.

1. Members should communicate beforehand and not go forward, as they usually do, like colliding atoms. They should logically coordinate their inquiry. There’s a lot of ground to cover and they don’t need repetitions, redundancies and free-associative journeys down tributaries that lead nowhere.

2. “It will be good for you to remember it’s not about you.” A health-care disaster has been visited on a significant number of Americans, who have been left understandably anxious, resentful and confused. If you use your time to pound the podium and get in the clips of the local news station back home, many of your constituents, seeing your theatrics, will recognize you to be an unhelpful blowhard out to gain from their pain. The national press will recognize you to be a grandstanding fool. Do you want that?

3. Do not take the bait when Democrats on the panel, who know they have been forced into defending the indefensible or joining a pile-on, try to change the subject. They’ll offer long, meandering (or accusatory and sarcastic) speeches on how Republicans have never wanted to help anyone in trouble and that’s why they’ve always opposed ObamaCare. Don’t engage, don’t start wrestling around with how many supported Social Security and who didn’t. Smile and let it go. You have limited time. Use it to find out what happened, what’s true and where we are.

4. Do not be defeated by Sebelius’s media coaches. Do not let the secretary’s slightly dazed unflappability get under your skin. All representatives of government are surrounded by communications advisers. Sebelius’s are no doubt advising her right now to do what they always tell officials in trouble to do: Come forth with long, meaningless yet on some level data-filled sentences that will steer clear of speaking plain truth and yet on some level imply the effort to be candid. (Yes, the irony: it is the taxpayers who pay for the media advisers who help the agency head mislead the taxpayers.) Sebelius will attempt to talk in a way that is arguably responsive and deliberately incomprehensible. She will not be trying to produce a colorful soundbite but to avoid one. She does not want to be on the evening news, she wants to get out of the hearing room with her career intact.

When government officials have been trained in this strategy, there is a tell. The tell is that they begin many of their sentences with the word, “So.”

As in:

Q: Madame Secretary, did you know or have reason to know the ObamaCare website would crash on opening day? If you did, did you tell the White House? Who in the White House? If you did not know, how did it happen that you, the person in charge of the program, did not understand the depth of its problems?

A: So, we know through historical experience that a vast, multitiered, horizontally integrated program will always yield or produce certain unanticipated challenges of a technological or other nature, which is inevitably and also predictably the pattern, and it’s increased by the scale and size of the endeavor . . .

Q: Let me ask: Did you know that as soon as the program debuted, millions of Americans would see their own health insurance policies canceled or terminated? And that they would often find that newer policies would be more expensive with less coverage? When did you come to understand this—during the writing of the law, after its passage, in the ensuing years? If you did not know that millions would lose their coverage, how did it happen that you did not know?

A: So, in the intervening days and months following the passage of the ACA, a focused task force composed of peer-reviewed stakeholders throughout the government and the private sector, in addition to appropriate designated agency officials, along with contractors and subcontractors . . .

This is what media advisers have gotten us to. If they had been advising clients in 1945-46 at the Nuremberg Trials the court transcripts would have looked like this: “So, part of the context within which directives were perceived is that there is a task announced and enforced by the government and its appropriate directors and agencies, and our topographical and rail line information, as provided on numerous occasions by the interior ministry, but also a number of people in the department had their own copies, suggested the most reliable train lines did in fact go through a town called Auschwitz. So considering that, and our responsibility to afford maximum efficiencies in accordance with the needs and directives, it was decided to . . .”

How to get around the obfuscation, indirection, passive voice, deliberately fractured grammar, and refusal to speak directly, clearly and pertinently?

Be courteous, cool, stay focused and press. “Madam Secretary, I know it’s hard under the lights, but I am going to ask for simple, direct answers. Please, at what point did you see a catastrophe coming? Who did you tell? And what did they say?”

“I must ask again, and I ask you to be clear and direct: Did you know, in the years that you and the president were saying ‘If you want to keep your current coverage you can keep it’—did you know that was not true?”

“You have heard the charge that that promise was a lie meant to aid in the selling of the Affordable Care Act to the American people. Was it a lie?”

“How did you expect the American people to react when they found out it wasn’t true?”

Keep to the question. Don’t make speeches. Find out the answer.

Update: Early reports say Sebelius will be apologetic in her testimony regarding the failed rollout. Meaning she does want a soundbite after all, and that’s it. An apology is fine, it’s appreciated, but an apology is not accountability. When a guy causes a fatal car crash it’s good if he says he’s sorry, but it doesn’t exonerate him. Was he driving under the influence? Was he texting? Was he asleep? Who’s going to pay for the damage, what will ease the suffering of the victims?

There are reports she will blame one or more of the outside contractors. This is weak—the government oversees and directs the contractors. It’s like the captain of the Titanic saying the problem is the company that made the rivets in the water tight compartments. Maybe, but it was his ship and he let it sail full steam into an icefield.